This page is the project hub for Notifications, a new engagement tool for Wikipedia and MediaWiki sites (also known as Echo). This product is designed to replace and/or augment existing notification systems on MediaWiki sites, as well as provide significantly more control to users as to how their notifications are handled, read, and deleted. This notifications project is being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's editor engagement team.

Notifications was released on the English Wikipedia on April 30, 2013 and has since been deployed on dozens more Wikipedias, with many more releases planned in coming months. The tool can also be tested here on MediaWiki.org. For more information, read this blog post and visit this FAQ page. For tips on how to test this tool, see this testing page. Once you've tested Notifications, please join the discussion on this talk page.

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Notifications inform you of new activity that affects you on Wikipedia -- and let you take quick action.

This new notifications system seeks to unify the delivery of interaction messages in MediaWiki core, through a common API that can provide a uniform interface for users. For a quick visual overview of this project, check the Notifications slides.

For our first release, we focused on new users, who need notifications more than power users. Specifically, we concentrated on some of the first notifications which a new user can receive after creating an account on Wikipedia. We also developed some features to support power users, but we initially emphasize notifications that can engage new users, who need this service most urgently. Anonymous, unregistered users will not receive notifications at this time.

For the first release of Notifications on the English Wikipedia in April 2013, our main focus was on supporting new users, who have most web and email notifications enabled by default. Current users have most web notifications turned on by default, and most email notifications turned off.

Here is the first 'minimum viable product' we deployed for that first release:

The central tracking bug, "MediaWiki needs a sane notification system", can be found at phabricator:T34281.
Currently, notifications within MediaWiki are ambiguous and replicative. Multiple extensions and functions will fire off notifications and very few utilize the same system. This creates massive user confusion.
For example, the following systems utilize their own, distinct methods of user notifications:

Primary Reasons are "providing a unified experience for the user" and "providing ease for developer implementation."

Unified UX: On the user end of the issue, notifications are presented to the user is many different forms. For example: orange bar at the top of the page, LiquidThreads notifications in the form of a number in the top right corner, or a watchlist notification via email. Each type is implemented differently and presents the event in a different manner, making the system confusing to users. A user should be able to easily maintain what notifications he/she wants to receive as well as be able to look at and act upon those notifications. With the current spread-out and differentiated notifications system, this is impossible, especially in cases where there are multiple wikis on a farm and notification events occur on each individual wiki.